AS Rod Stewart’s Sailing was piped through the ship’s tannoy, HMS Ark Royal’s sailors braced themselves for the ship’s final moments at sea.
Many could be seen fighting back a lump in their throat as the great ship made her last ever entrance into Portsmouth
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• Ark Royal IV was the subject of a well-known documentary, Sailor, in 1978 on BBC Television, about life onboard HMS Ark Royal. Rod’s hit Sailing was used as the title theme tune for the series.
HMS Ark Royal is the fifth ship of the Royal Navy named in honour of the flagship of the English fleet that defeated the Spanish Armada.
• It was launched in June 1981, sponsored by Queen Elizabeth and the Queen Mother.
• It has a length of 210 metres and a displacement of 22,000 tons. It can carry 685 crew members and 22 aircrafts.
• Deployed in 1993 to the Adriatic during the Bosnian War. She sailed to the Persian Gulf for the 2003 Invasion of Iraq in 2003
• Celebrated 25 years in service earlier this year.
• Was built at Swan Hunter’s dockyard in Newcastle. Construction on the hull began in 1978.
• Entered service on July 1, 1985 and was commissioned in the presence of the Queen Mother four months later.
• The construction cost was £320 million but the ship was delivered by Swan Hunter four and a half months ahead of schedule, with some mid-build alterations having been made due to lessons learned from the Falklands conflict.
• Ark Royal – motto “Zeal Does Not Rest” – is the fifth ship to bear the name.
• Originally built for Sir Walter Raleigh, it became the flagship of the English fleet which defeated the Spanish Armada in 1588.
• The third Ark Royal took part in the sinking of the Bismarck, a German battleship, and one of the most famous warships of the World War II. The lead ship of her class, named after the 19th century German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, Bismarck displaced more than 50,000 tonnes fully loaded and was the largest warship then commissioned
• The current Ark Royal helped bring peace to Bosnia in 1993/94 and, following an extensive refit and upgrade in the late 1990s, took part in the second Gulf War in 2003.